"slang" and "informal" as dict labels

[Michael Israel]

In my experience, people in the Bay Area do occassionally refer
to San Francisco as "SF." My intuition is that this shortening
is used there much the way the term "the City" is. That is,
it is used when speaking inside the Bay Area to distinguish
SF from other local cities. Thus one might talk about going
to see a show over in SF if one is speaking to someone in, say,
Berkeley, but if you meet someone at a conference in LA or NY, you
wouldn't tell them about life in "SF", anymore than you would
presume there to refer to San Francisco as "the City."

So, "SF" would appear to be somewhere intermediate between abbreviations
which are never used in speech ("SD" for San Diego and "NY" for
New York), and those which are regularly so used (LA, KC, DC).

Michael

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Laurence Horn wrote:

> At 10:21 AM -0500 2/17/03, James A. Landau wrote:
> >
> >
> >I have no idea about San Francisco (which is also sometimes called "SF",
> >isn't it?).
> >
> If I'm right, it depends on what "called" means.  As I mentioned, my
> sense is that it's ok to refer to it that way in print, but that
> nobody actually says "SF" colloquially; it's like "NY" for New York
> or "SD" for San Diego in this respect, rather than "LA" or "KC".  I
> could be wrong, though.
>
> Larry
>